Eliminating greenhouse gas emissions in the electric power industry might require it to change from top to bottom – the technologies that are used, the business models employed, the number and scope of market participants, and the regulatory oversight required. The only thing that we can safely say won’t change are the laws of physics that impose constraints on the operation of power systems.

The good news (at least for folks who are concerned about climate change) is that the electric power industry is changing quickly, largely due to technological advances and policy pressure. What that means for conventional, vertically integrated electric power utilities – companies like Duke Energy— is a little uncertain, but they’re spending a lot of time thinking about how they can be successful players in the grid of the future.

As the electric power industry evolves, another thing we’re learning is that there is a big need for an influx of new workers with a broader set of expertise. Some of this need is related to the facts of life: baby boomers who worked their whole careers at power companies are retiring. Some industry estimates project that 50% of the workforce at electric power utilities will retire over the next several years, and these folks will need to be replaced.

Image from Utility Dive

But perhaps more importantly, the types of skills needed in the electric power industry are changing in a number of ways:

For one, the future of the industry may not be dominated by conventional electric utilities or for that matter, even by suppliers of energy.

In a grid dominated by renewables, demand side management (i.e., managing and reacting to customers’ behavior) and storage will become critical components.

Even at big utilities, the pathway to a job is no longer limited to mechanical and electrical engineering. Increasingly, utilities need workers with skills in data science, software development, business, and marketing.

In a lot of ways, this shift benefits UNC students. Even though the technical rigor necessary for a career in the energy industry has been available at UNC for a long time, without a significant undergraduate engineering presence on campus, some doors have been closed to our graduates.

The shifting nature of energy industry means new doors are springing open. We just need to make sure UNC grads are walking through them.

Part of that means exposing students to the benefits of marrying their intellectual and philosophical interest in sustainability to tangible career pathways. For more on the incredible strides UNC has taken in this regard, you should read UNC professor Greg Gangi’s recent blog post.

Another important aspect of preparing students for new opportunities in the energy industry is adapting undergraduate curriculums. At UNC, the Curriculum for the Environment and Ecology (ENEC) is doing just that, having recently hired a new lecturer in Energy.

I’ve tried to do my own small part too, by developing an Energy Modeling and Analytics course (ENEC 490), which is offered in the fall. The course uses a “flipped classroom” approach, with formal lectures delivered online via YouTube, and in-class time used to develop coding and modeling skills through the completion of industry case studies.

One of the things I’ve been most impressed with over the last several years is how these shifts in focus at UNC and within ENEC have been spurred by student interest.

On the part of the university and ENEC, this shows not only a willingness to adapt quickly (not always a strength of big institutions), but also a recognition that, in terms of defining societal priorities and creating new areas of economic and intellectual growth in the future, the students are often the teachers.

Jordan Kern is a Research Assistant Professor at the UNC Institute for the Environment. You can learn more about his research and teaching portfolio at http://jdkern.web.unc.edu/

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We don’t often think about the energy it takes to satisfy our thirst, but where we get our drinking water has huge consequences for how much energy is needed. In many parts of the world, fresh water sources like lakes or aquifers are becoming scarce, forcing residents to settle for supplies that aren’t as clean. And the dirtier the water, the more energy it takes to purify.

Salt is especially hard to remove. In desert or coastal regions with limited sources of freshwater, residents must use a process called desalination to turn salty groundwater or seawater into drinking water. We’ve already covered how mixing saltwater with freshwater releases a lot of energy, so, to do the reverse– to remove salt from water– consumes a lot of energy.

Exactly how much energy is required depends on the method of desalination. Distillation (which involves boiling) is a simple way to desalinate water, but it’s also one of the most energy-intensive. By using a technology called reverse osmosis, we can desalinate water using about 1/10th as much energy as distillation. So compared to boiling the water, using reverse osmosis is much more efficient. But reverse osmosis still requires about 100x more energy than treating fresh surface water or groundwater. In fact, you could charge your smartphone with the energy it takes to desalinate just 1 gallon of seawater!

In the U.S., most plants are located in Florida, Texas, and California (shown on this cool map), but there are about a dozen here in North Carolina. If you’ve ever visited the Outer Banks, your drinking water probably came from a reverse osmosis desalination plant.

There are so many reverse osmosis plants in the world, that together they produce 4x as much water in one year as refineries do oil! But virtually all of these plants were built as a “last resort,” in areas where there simply isn’t enough freshwater to meet the needs of consumers, industry, and agriculture. When it’s available, treating freshwater is always preferable to desalination.

The more we have to rely on seawater and other salty water resources, the more energy it will take to slake our thirst. So next time you take a drink of water, remember that you’re not just drinking ounces, you’re drinking watts.

Want to learn more about reverse osmosis desalination? Check out this animated video from the Seven Seas Water Corporation.

Ryan Kingsbury, P.E., is a PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he is a member of the Coronell Research Group. Orlando Coronell, PhD, and his research team study membrane-based processes for water purification and energy production and storage, with applications in municipal, industrial, and household systems. Ryan studies salinity gradient energy which you can read more about here.

Program Summary (NOVA): Five years after the earthquake and tsunami that triggered the unprecedented trio of meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, scientists and engineers are struggling to control an ongoing crisis. What’s next for Fukushima? What’s next for Japan? And what’s next for a world that seems determined to jettison one of our most important carbon-free sources of energy? Despite the catastrophe—and the ongoing risks associated with nuclear—a new generation of nuclear power seems poised to emerge the ashes of Fukushima. NOVA investigates how the realities of climate change, the inherent limitations of renewable energy sources, and the optimism and enthusiasm of a new generation of nuclear engineers is looking for ways to reinvent nuclear technology, all while the most recent disaster is still being managed. What are the lessons learned from Fukushima? And with all of nuclear’s inherent dangers, how might it be possible to build a safe nuclear future?

Earlier this year I heard University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill doctoral student Ryan Kingsbury, a member of Orlando Coronell’s lab discuss his research and was introduced to the term “blue energy” for the first time. Ryan studies energy storage and generation from salinity gradients. Salinity gradient energy or “blue energy” refers to the energy released when water with different concentrations of salt mix (this is essentially the reverse of what happens during desalination). For those of you who teach about diffusion, here is an opportunity to show your students how selective diffusion of positive and negative ions across membranes can drive the production of electricity!

Salinity gradient energy is at the cutting edge of research on renewable energy. Using ion-selective membranes and a process known as reverse electrodialysis (RED), natural and industrial waters (e.g. seawater, desalination brine, etc.) can be used to store energy, generate electricity and even treat wastewater! Ryan recently described the physics behind blue energy and RED in a bit more detail in his own blog post.

And now for the pickle part. It turns out one of the industrial wastewaters being investigated by researchers is the leftover salt water from making Mt. Olive pickles! Researchers from NC State University, UNC-CH, East Carolina University and the Coastal Studies Institute are developing a process that uses salinity gradient to release energy from Mt. Olive wastewater. There is a 6 minute video describing this multi-institutional collaboration and a transcript of the video also available. The project PIs (Dr. Coronell from UNC and Dr. Call from NCSU) also participated in a February 2016 radio interview about salinity gradient energy which explains their project more broadly.

In addition to pickles, NC is also known for its estuaries; the mixing of salt and fresh water that occurs in estuaries is an untapped source of blue energy! In fact, I learned from reading Ryan’s blog post that where rivers flow into the sea and fresh and salt water mix, the amount of energy created is equivalent to the river falling into the ocean from the height of the Eiffel tower!

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The 2017 BioenergizeME Infographic Challenge kicks off today! This year’s theme is Exploring the Future American Energy Landscape. The US Department of Energy’s Bioenergies Technologies Office is asking 9th- through 12th-grade student teams to use technology to research, interpret, apply, and then design an infographic that responds to one of five research topic areas selected for 2017:

History of Modern Bioenergy
Sustainability Bioenergy and Society
Workforce and EducationScience and Technology

Even better, all of the tools necessary to integrate this challenge into your curriculum or offer it as an after-school activity are provided!

To be considered for the competition, teams must register by Feb. 3, 2017 and infographics must be submitted by March 3, 2017.

Check out the 2016 award winning infographics on cellulosic ethanol, algae as a biofuel and energy from biomass. You can view all previous winning infographicshere. One NC teacher remarked that she would incorporate these infographics into her AP Environmental Science class by having her students review and critique the infographics to decide which they would fund for further development.

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I live in the Triangle and have seen firsthand the effects of the partial shutdown of the Columbia pipeline as I have driven by many gas stations this week where no fuel was available. An event such as this can be used to remind students where our gasoline comes from and to prompt them to consider the consequences of having to transport fuels over long distances.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) featured the pipeline disruption and provided the map below in its September 21st, Today in Energy feature article (which you can sign up to receive each weekday via email). According to this article “the U.S. Southeast is supplied primarily by pipeline flows from refineries along the U.S. Gulf Coast and supplemented by marine shipments from the U.S. Gulf Coast and imports.” Seeing this map helped me to understand why this pipeline disruption impacted central North Carolina to a great extent.

There is an online mapping tool available that enable users to create their own maps as they evaluate different energy sources. I used the EIAs U.S. Energy Mapping System to quickly create a similar map that shows petroleum refineries (boxes); petroleum pipelines (dashed lines); and petroleum ports (ships):

Then I added additional map layers to also show oil wells (light brown dots) and oil/gas platforms (dark brown dots) in federal waters so students can also see the distribution of wells and platforms in relation to petroleum refineries.

I would love to hear from teachers who have incorporated this current event into their instruction.

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Here is another idea for exposing your students to real data – have them create and/or analyze wind roses! Wind roses are visual representations of the distribution of wind speed and direction for a particular location based on meteorological observations. Wind roses are useful in evaluating the wind potential for a site, comparing wind potential at two or more sites and assessing how wind potential changes seasonally. To learn how to interpret a wind rose click here.

Wind rose plots from the National Weather and Climate Center are available for 237 cities across the United States based on wind measurements for each month of the year from 1961-1990. Wind rose plots for the following North Carolina cities are available: Asheville, Cape Hatteras, Charlotte, Greensboro, Raleigh and Wilmington. Your students could compare wind roses for coastal, Piedmont and western regions of the state.

Who has seen the wind? Harnessing Alternative Energy (2010) is a lesson written by a NC science teacher and available at Learn NC. In Activity 2 of this lesson, students assess wind potential of an area by evaluating local wind data and constructing a wind rose. Sample wind data and instructions for using the Wind Rose Plotter Programme are provided in the student worksheet (NOTE: the url for the wind rose plotter program is not accurate, use the link provided in this post instead).